Read it.
In almost every description of a declining civilization we find the same tropes: an excess of liberty, a confusion of social norms, and the weakening of authority that soon descends into lawlessness. The medieval Muslim sociologist Ibn Khaldun, who developed one of the first theories of anacyclosis—the rise and fall of political regimes—explained this phenomenon as the loss of ¢a?abiyyah (group consciousness or social unity). Exactly what it is that undermines cohesion in the first place, however, has been the subject of almost mythic speculation. Some accounts attribute it to the presence of foreign cultures and the “confusion of tongues”; others to the spread of witchcraft or deviant spiritual forces that cast doubt over religious and natural laws. A popular anthropological theory, proposed by J. D. Unwin, is that social breakdown begins with an increase in prosperity and the weakening of sexual restraint.
Hmmm. Sounds familiar…,.
But another theory, perhaps overshadowed by these, once exerted a powerful influence over the premodern world: that the decline of a civilization can begin in the decline of its music. Indeed, unhealthy societies are often described as “discordant” in figurative terms. But in ancient civilizations—especially classical Greece and China—the relationship between musical and social harmony was much more than a metaphor. It was believed that exposure to disorderly music could lead directly to the collapse of the political order. This degeneration, Plato warned in his dialogue the Laws,3 occurs when the taste for sensational music creates a “theatrocracy”: a society ruled by the irrational whims of the audience rather than any objective standard of the good.
“Take but degree away, untune that string / And hark what discord follows!” —Ulysses, Troilus and Cressida, Act 1 Scene 3.
The idea of theatrocracy, or “rule by the audience,” finds itself curiously relevant to nations in the modern West that are no longer, at least in the classical sense, strictly democracies. In a genuine democracy, there may be a diversity of individuals and communities—being, as Plato described it, “a coat of many colours”—but the state must be unified by a shared consensus about virtue and justice. It follows that democracy requires the participation of rational, autonomous citizens who will always act in the interests of the common good. With the rise of individualism and a thinning definition of “citizenship,” this has ceased to be the case. Especially in an age of technology—when algorithms prey on our most irrational whims and political opinion is swayed by emotional reaction—the conditions that make for rational citizenship, and thus for genuine democracy, have been compromised. What we have instead may turn out to be much closer to the quasi-anarchic theatrocracy that Plato warned against in the Laws.
Ain’t that the truth.
One might even say that our society started turning to shit when our music started turning to shit.
Most people these days would count ‘classic rock’ (the kind of music that was popular when I was a young man) as still being popular today—a time span of about fifty years.
None of my contemporaries when I was a young man gave a shit what was popular in music half a century before.
Music went from ‘big band’ to ‘doo-wop’ to ‘rock & roll’ in the span of about ten years; rock & roll still dominates among the general population, however much ‘rap’ and ‘hip-hop’ attempt to displace it. (Try to find ‘rap’ or ‘hip-hop’ that is as musically compex and harmonious as the Beatles, CSN/Y, the Moody Blues, or even Styx or Kansas. Can’t be done.)
About the only thing that has remained constant is the American Bandstand Criterion: “It’s got a good beat and you can dance to it.”
But all of this changed, so goes the dialogue, with the arrival of a certain kind of poet. Much confusion surrounds Plato’s criticism of poetry, which the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch attempts to resolve.7 Murdoch explains that Plato did not, contrary to a common misconception, condemn genuine poets: men of technical skill who received divine inspiration from the Muses. He did, however, condemn another kind of poet who had “native genius”8 but abused his talent to subvert order and harmony—much like a sophist who abused language to distort the truth. Such were the poets who took to the Attican stage, and thanks to them, “an unmusical licence set in.”
Two words: Maya Angelou. ‘Nuff said.
